Ethereum Classic

What is Ethereum Classic?

Ethereum is created in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin. Ethereum, just like Bitcoin, uses blockchain technology to power the decentralized network. But where Bitcoin can be used for just one purpose (electronic cash), Ethereum can be used to build decentralized applications using smart contracts.

In 2016, a company called The Dao was hacked. The Dao was some kind of crowd funding platform. The Dao was hacked and $50 million worth of Ethers were “stolen”. But The Dao had some security checks in place. The $50 million was not gone but locked in place for 28 days.

In this limited timeframe, the community and developers looked for a solution. This solution ended up in a hard fork of the Ethereum network. Essentially every stolen Ethers were restored. This happened on 20 July 2016. Since this date, Ethereum hard forked into Ethereum and Ethereum classic.

Mining algorithm

Ethereum Classic is the original Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum Classic uses the POW (Proof of Work) algorithm. This means that you can mine Ethereum Classic with your computer (GPU).

Ethereum Classic circulation and block info

At this time of writing, there are 95,309,305 Ether classic tokens in circulation. For information about block or transactions, you can use gastracker.

What can you do with Ethereum Classic?

Since Ethereum Classic is created during a hard fork of the Ethereum network, ETC is considered obsolete. But despite the hack of The Dao, there are still improvements made on the ETC network.

But it is doubtful that ETC will have any future use since Ethereum is still the main platform. Maybe there will be improvements on the network that will differentiate ETC from ETH. But for now, you can only use ETC for trading.